Words by: Akira Kerr
Art by: Sama Harris

Maren is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.

I met her while I was studying abroad, and she quickly became a beloved member of our group of kindred international folk. One time we all sent a picture of ourselves from when we were little to our group chat and she took it upon herself to categorise us by whether we would have been a kid who stabbed other kids with pencils or who were the unfortunate stab-ees. Maren is very flirtatious. She threw winks at people across the table, once suggestively told me she would ‘tell me about it later’, and tenderly slow-danced with people when we went to karaoke.

She is also asexual and aromantic.

For some people, asexuality conjures ideas about loneliness and unfulfillment. It’s hard to imagine a life with no sexual desire, and no sex — something a lot of us believe to be synonymous with love and romance. But for Maren, she told me she feels sad for people who are romantically or sexually attracted to other people.

“There are a lot of people who think the biggest feeling you can have is having or wanting a partner and loving them. But there are different kinds of love,” she told me.

For her, sharing friendships is a kind of love that is most fulfilling. Just before she left Spain for her exchange, she met someone who she could see being her platonic life partner. She tells me that they have plans to one day live on a farm together in rural Spain, where they will whave cows grazing around their picturesque property.

For an aromantic person, this sounds pretty romantic. But Maren says that is one of the things people get wrong about people like her. She says that people think aromantics don’t like romance, but she enjoys everything from romance novels and films, to taking her friends on romantic picnic dates in the park. She likes hearing about her friends’ love lives and making dirty jokes to the point that people are perplexed that she is asexual.

In this sense, her asexuality gives her freedom. “If you have a partner and you make sexual jokes, people might think of you differently,” she says. “But it’s not my experience, it’s just jokes, so I feel like I’m more detached from it”.

But Maren’s asexuality has also brought some pain both to herself and others in her life. Before she realised she was asexual and aromantic, she had had a few best friends. She had mistaken her strong feelings of wanting to be close with them for romantic feelings, and started relationships with them. But she quickly realised that it wasn’t a boyfriend she wanted after all.

For one of these boyfriends, despite being a very shortlived relationship, he was torn up over the break-up.

“I felt bad for him. I felt so so sad for him because I did love him, but not in that way.” She said that they had spent two weeks being a couple, but for one of those weeks she was figuring out how to break the news to him. They were able to rehash their friendship after a few months when he started dating someone else, but Maren still felt there was distance between them that hadn’t been there before.

Since realising she was asexual and aromantic, Maren has been very open about it, and says that she feels like it’s the easiest sexuality to be. There’s no real need to come out to anyone. When a prying relative asks if she’s seeing anyone she can simply say “I’m not interested in dating”.

Asexuality tends to be one of the lesser talked about identities in the LGBTQ+ community. In a world that is becoming increasingly communicative about sex and relationships, where talking about sex in all of its forms is slowly being destigmatised, conversations about not having sex are being left behind.

But there is plenty to be talked about when it comes to asexuality and aromanticism — just look at Maren, a romantic aromantic who will flirt with you until you can’t stop blushing.